EU courts make bombshell ruling against vaccine manufacturers

It can seem at times like the deck is stacked in every possible way against the victims of vaccine injury. The mainstream media insists that vaccines save lives, have no side effects and cannot harm you. The medical community stubbornly claims that there is no way your child could possibly have been harmed by a vaccine, when so many millions of other vaccine recipients are fine. And, in the United States at least, you cannot pursue a vaccine manufacturer through the regular court system to demand compensation for the harm done by its products.

Well, it seems like the tide might be turning at last. The Swedish parliament recently ruled against enforcing the mandatory vaccinations of its citizens, recognizing that to do so would be a violation of the country’s Constitution.

Back in 2006, a plaintiff known only as “Mr. J.W.” sued pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur, claiming that he had contracted multiple sclerosis (M.S.) as a direct result of a hepatitis B vaccination he received in late 1998. The French Court of Appeals denied Mr. J.W.’s claim, stating that science has not proved a causal link between the hep B vaccine and M.S.

The case was then passed to France’s Court of Cassation, and eventually brought before the European Union. Though not specifically ruling on the case of Mr. J.W., having considered the evidence before it, the court decreed that henceforth, European courts may consider vaccines as a possible cause of illness, even when there is no specific scientific proof linking a certain vaccine to a specific health condition. [Related: For all the breaking news be sure to visit Vaccines.news.]

In part, their ruling states:

“[W]here medical research neither establishes nor rules out the existence of a link between the administering of the vaccine and the occurrence of the victim’s disease, the existence of a causal link between the defect attributed to the vaccine and the damage suffered by the victim will always be considered to be established when certain predetermined causation-related factual evidence is presented.”

The claimant in such a case would need to provide “specific and consistent evidence” related to the time elapsed between the administration of the vaccine and the illness, proof of a lack of family history of the condition, and evidence of a significant number of other patients developing the same illness after receiving that particular vaccine.

“Using those criteria, you could reasonably make the case that someone should be compensated for developing leukemia after eating a peanut butter sandwich. It’s very frustrating that they have such a ridiculously low bar for causality. … To prove whether one thing causes another has to happen in a scientific venue, and the courts are not a scientific venue.”

The CBS News article from which that quotation is derived makes no mention of Dr. Offit’s glaring conflict of interest: Offit is the patent holder of the RotaTeq vaccination, a vaccine which is mandated by the CDC, and presumably provides Offit with millions in income each year. Clearly, he has a vested interest in insisting that as many people as possible should be vaccinated.

The fact is, the EU court’s ruling is nothing more than common sense. As Juliette Scarfe, a lawyer from the U.K. points out, “This is common sense, surely. If I develop a debilitating illness shortly after receiving a vaccine, I should be the medical evidence in chief. It should not matter whether the medical community accepts or rejects that there exists a causal link between the disease and the vaccine in order to consider my defective product claim.”